Why read Jungle Laboratories?

Book cover of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill

Book description

In the 1940s chemists discovered that barbasco, a wild yam indigenous to Mexico, could be used to mass-produce synthetic steroid hormones. Barbasco spurred the development of new drugs, including cortisone and the first viable oral contraceptives, and positioned Mexico as a major player in the global pharmaceutical industry. Yet few…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Jungle Laboratories as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Benjamin Breen

Author

I admire the way that Jungle Laboratories weaves together the story of something globally famous—the birth control pill—with an untold history of a specific time and place in rural Mexico.

In this superbly researched book, Harvard History of Science professor Gabriela Soto Laveaga reveals how the yam fields of Veracruz became improbable sites of pharmaceutical innovation in the years during and after World War II. This book is a model of transnational history at its finest and a strikingly original take on the history of pharmacy, gender, labor, and global science.

From Benjamin's list on the history of drugs.